Inside a cramped third-floor office of Hillary Clinton’s once-bustling presidential campaign headquarters in the Ballston neighborhood of Arlington, Va., Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod put the finishing touches on a political hit list. It was late June 2008, and Hillary haddropped her bid for the presidency earlier that month. The war room, where her brain trust had devolved into profanity-laced shouting matches, was empty. The data crunchers were gone. The political director had drifted out. A handful of Hillary’s aides had already hooked up with Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign in Chicago.

Most Popular

Balderston’s salt-and-pepper beard gave him the look of a college English professor who didn’t need to shave for his job. Then in his early fifties, he had been with Bill and Hillary Clinton since their White House days, serving as a deputy assistant to the president and later as Hillary’s legislative director and deputy chief of staff in her New York Senate office. The official government titles obscured Balderston’s true value: He was an elite political operator and one of Hillary’s favorite suppliers of gossip. After more than a dozen years spent working for the Clintons, he knew how to keep score in a political race.

Elrod, a toned 31-year-old blonde with a raspy Ozark drawl, had an even longer history with the Clintons that went back to her childhood in Siloam Springs, a town of 15,000 people in northwestern Arkansas. She had known Bill Clinton since at least the age of five. Her father, John Elrod, a prominent lawyer in Fayetteville, first befriended the future president at Arkansas Boys State, an annual civics camp for high school juniors, when they were teenagers. Like Bill Clinton, Adrienne Elrod had a twinkle in her blue eyes and a broad smile that conveyed warmth instantaneously. She had first found work in the Clinton White House after a 1996 internship there, then became a Democratic Party political operative and later held senior posts on Capitol Hill. She joined the Hillary Clinton for President outfit as a communications aide and then shifted into Balderston’s delegate-courting congressional-relations office in March. Trusted because of her deep ties to the Clinton network, Elrod helped Balderston finalize the list.

For months they had meticulously updated a wall-size dry-erase board with color-coded symbols, letters and arrows to track which lawmakers were leaning toward endorsing Hillary and which were headed in Obama’s direction. For example, the letters “LO” indicated that a lawmaker was “leaning Obama,” while “BD” in blue denoted that he or she was a member of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition on Capitol Hill.

As one of the last orders of business for a losing campaign, they recorded in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet the names and deeds of members of Congress. They carefully noted who had endorsed Hillary, who had backed Obama, and who had stayed on the sidelines—standard operating procedure for any high-end political organization. But the data went into much more nuanced detail. “We wanted to have a record of who endorsed us and who didn’t,” a member of Hillary’s campaign team said, “and of those who endorsed us, who went the extra mile and who was just kind of there. And of those who didn’t endorse us, those who understandably didn’t endorse us because they are [Congressional Black Caucus] members or Illinois members. And then, of course, those who endorsed him but really should have been with her … that burned her.”

For Hillary, whose loss was of course not the end of her political career, the spreadsheet was a necessity of modern political warfare, an improvement on what old-school politicians called a “favor file.” It meant that when asks rolled in, she and Bill would have at their fingertips all the information needed to make a quick decision—including extenuating, mitigating and amplifying factors—so that friends could be rewarded and enemies punished.

The Sevens

Hillary Clinton’s staffers made a list of Democratic members of Congress, rating them from 1 (most helpful) to 7 (most treacherous). Here are some of the 7s—those whose support of Barack Obama was particularly galling to the Clinton team.

Former Sen. John Kerry

“Barack Obama can be, will be and should be the next president of the United States. … Who better than Barack Obama to bring new credibility to America’s role in the world and help restore our moral authority?” (Jan. 10, 2008)

Sen. Ted Kennedy

“I believe there is one candidate who has extraordinary gifts of leadership and character matched to the extraordinary demands of this moment in history. … I’m proud to stand with him here today and offer my help, offer my voice, offer my energy, my commitment to make Barack Obama the next president of the United States.” (July 28, 2008)

Sen. Jay Rockefeller

“Barack Obama is the most qualified person—Democrat or Republican—to lead our country in the face of enormous challenges—the very real threat of terrorism, economic uncertainty and instability at home and abroad.” (Feb. 29, 2008)

Sen. Claire McCaskill

“This is a man who has incredible intellectual heft … who is not afraid to figure out a new and different way to tackle problems … Only once in a generation does a leader come along that has that particular gift. … Barack Obama is, I believe, right for the country this time.” (Jan. 13, 2008)

Sen. Bob Casey

“This campaign is a chance for America, a chance for America to chart a new course … I believe in my heart that there’s one person who's uniquely qualified to lead us in that new direction, and that is Barack Obama.” (March 28, 2008)

Sen. Patrick Leahy

“We need a president who can reintroduce America to the world and actually reintroduce America to ourselves … I believe Barack Obama is the best person to do that.” (Jan. 17, 2008)

Rep. Chris Van Hollen

“I enthusiastically support Senator Obama. He will be our nominee, and now it's very important that we all unite behind his candidacy. He has energized millions of new voters, and if we can sustain that momentum by coming together, he will be the next president of the United States.” (June 4, 2008)

Former Rep. Baron Hill

“If we are going to develop real solutions for Hoosier families, for America's families, we have to move past the partisan gridlock. I believe both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama want to do that and I believe both are formidable candidates. But, I also believe that only one of them truly can. … I have decided to support Senator Obama.” (April 30, 2008)

Rep. Rob Andrews

“There have been signals coming out of the Clinton campaign that have racial overtones that indeed disturb me. … I had a private conversation with a high-ranking person in the campaign … that used a racial line of argument that I found very disconcerting.” (June 3, 2008)

Their spreadsheet formalized the deep knowledge of those involved in building it. Like so many of the Clinton help, Balderston and Elrod were walking favor files. They remembered nearly every bit of assistance the Clintons had given and every slight made against them. Almost six years later, most Clinton aides can still rattle off the names of traitors and the favors that had been done for them, then provide details of just how each of the guilty had gone on to betray the Clintons—as if it all had happened just a few hours before. The data project ensured that the acts of the sinners and saints would never be forgotten.

There was a special circle of Clinton hell reserved for people who had endorsed Obama or stayed on the fence after Bill and Hillary had raised money for them, appointed them to a political post or written a recommendation to ice their kid’s application to an elite school. On one early draft of the hit list, each Democratic member of Congress was assigned a numerical grade from 1 to 7, with the most helpful to Hillary earning 1s and the most treacherous drawing 7s. The set of 7s included Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), as well as Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Baron Hill (D-Ind.) and Rob Andrews (D-N.J.).

Yet even a 7 didn’t seem strong enough to quantify the betrayal of some onetime allies.

When the Clintons sat in judgment, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) got the seat closest to the fire. Bill and Hillary had gone all out for her when she ran for Senate in 2006, as had Obama. But McCaskill seemed to forget that favor when NBC’s Tim Russert asked her whether Bill had been a great president, during a Meet the Press debate against then-Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.) in October 2006. “He’s been a great leader,” McCaskill said of Bill, “but I don’t want my daughter near him.”

McCaskill regretted her remark instantly; the anguish brought her “to the point of epic tears,” according to a friend. She knew the comment had sounded much more deliberate than a forgivable slip of the tongue. So did Hillary, who immediately canceled a planned fundraiser for McCaskill. A few days later, McCaskill called Bill Clinton to offer a tearful apology. He was gracious, which just made McCaskill feel worse. After winning the seat, she was terrified of running into Hillary Clinton in the Capitol. “I really don’t want to be in an elevator alone with her,” McCaskill confided to the friend.

But Hillary, who was just then embarking on her presidential campaign, still wanted something from McCaskill—the Missourian’s endorsement. Women’s groups, including the pro-choice women’s fundraising network EMILY’s List, pressured McCaskill to jump aboard the Clinton bandwagon, and Hillary courted her new colleague personally, setting up a one-on-one lunch in the Senate Dining Room in early 2007. Rather than ask for McCaskill’s support directly, Hillary took a softer approach, seeking common ground on the struggles of campaigning, including the physical toll. “There’s a much more human side to Hillary,” McCaskill thought.